I’m terrible when it comes to yak shaving. For those new to the phrase, yak shaving is a form of procrastination. It’s performing an almost meaningless task with the intent to accomplish a larger, more meaningful task.
This evening, I was working out how I could set up Obsidian to Hugo publishing. This devolved into an over-engineered solution that would require syncing my Obsidian vault to a server that would host the blog, using an open-source Python package to perform format translations, filter, and push the files into Hugo’s, then serve the content. The juice is not worth the squeeze. It’s far simpler to write these files within the Hugo content directory and serve them via GitHub pages.
This is already one step removed from the existing deployment flow, wherein I was writing all posts in org-mode with Emacs, then leveraging ox-hugo to perform the translations.
This is just one recent example; through the years, I’ve spent too much time trying to be efficiently “productive,” when I could just be productive. Most times I end up being a bit more efficient without being productive. This reminds me of a quote I read recently:
The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere, which means “to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all. - Tiago Forte (Building A Second Brain)
This is just one small example. I’ve spent hours on my Emacs configuration with marginal gains over using something more modern, supported, and widely-used. I intend to make a concerted effort at shaving fewer yaks.